Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a second cloud computing region specifically intended to host top-secret classified information from U.S. defense, intelligence, and national security agencies.
The new cloud region – AWS Top Secret-West – is the company’s second commercial cloud qualified for classified workloads. The first, AWS Top Secret-East, has been hosting the government’s top-secret data since 2014. AWS Top Secret-West provides additional geographic availability and resiliency of AWS cloud services for U.S. intelligence and defense agencies to host, analyze and run applications, the company said.
“With two top-secret regions, customers in the U.S. defense, intelligence, and national security communities can deploy multi-region architectures to achieve the highest levels of resiliency and availability essential to their most critical national security missions,” AWS Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector Max Peterson said in a blog post on Monday.
These regions and availability zones enable national security customers to build highly resilient architectures and store data close to users for latency-sensitive workloads, he added. In addition, they gain proximity to new geographically distributed workloads and mission users.
The new location for the region was not disclosed, but it is over 1,000 miles away from AWS Top Secret-East, located in Northern Virginia.
